


Reestablished 2024

by lodessa



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: Apologies, F/M, Hospitals, Making Out, Making Up, Post-Season/Series 04, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:09:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27142930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lodessa/pseuds/lodessa
Summary: “Veronica?”  he says with a tone of utter bewilderment and disbelief, looking frantically around the hospital room.  “What are you doing here?”“Apparently I’m your emergency contact, which… wow, really?  I mean setting aside that we haven’t talked in like five years-”
Relationships: Veronica Mars/Eli "Weevil" Navarro
Comments: 18
Kudos: 34





	Reestablished 2024

**Author's Note:**

  * For [feeisamarshmallow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/feeisamarshmallow/gifts).



> In response to a request for Weevil and Veronica as exes meeting after years of not speaking or meeting at the ER. It's not quite either of those, but hopefully it is close enough to please. 
> 
> Sorry about the delay. I started out writing a totally different premise involving them having a secret child he didn't know about and then I listened to all the revenge /bad bitch genre Taylor Swift songs and thought about how they applied to Veronica, before finally settling on this concept which had nothing to do with either and writing it out in one sitting.

“Veronica?” he says with a tone of utter bewilderment and disbelief, looking frantically around the hospital room. “What are you doing here?”

This was a mistake. She shouldn’t have come, or at least, she shouldn’t have stayed and waited for him to wake up. 

“Apparently I’m your emergency contact, which… wow, really? I mean setting aside that we haven’t talked in like five years-”

He cracks a smile at that. Okay, maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea. Or at least it was his bad idea and not hers.

“I figured if I was ever in bad enough shape for them to have to call whoever I listed, it wasn’t like my boys or my sister were going to be able to do shit about it. You, on the other hand, shit goes sideways and I get screwed… I’ll bet any day on your ability to stick your nose in the middle of it and do your Mars thing.”

“I’m not sure whether to be flattered or appalled,” she replies, not buying his excuse, but he’s let her get away with enough of them for her to not call him on it, at least not right now. 

“I could take you off, if it's a problem,” he offers, like it isn’t a big deal but they both know it is.

“That would make it much more inconvenient for me to get into here and accuse you of assorted crimes,” she teases, throwing that out there before he can bring it up. “It’s not like I can claim I’m your sister or something.”

“You’d relish the challenge of sneaking your way in,” he teases back, and for a moment it feels like all these years didn’t happen, like things are back the way they were all those years ago when they were just teenagers, too young to do anything else. “So what did I allegedly do this time?”

“Push a small child out of the path of a moving vehicle,” she admits. “Do you not remember?”

The kid’s mom had caught her on the way in, all full of grateful tears and wanting to tell whoever she thought Veronica was to him all about what a hero he was.

“Maybe I just wanted to hear you say it,” he smiles slyly, half joking and half shy.

“Say what?” she feigns.

“That I did something good. That, you know, maybe occasionally I do something right for a change.”

It’s sarcasm but there’s a rawness under it, the scar of decades of shame and setbacks.

“About that…” The words stick in her throat, no matter how many times she’s practiced them to herself, how many times she has promised her therapist she was going to reach out and tell him some of the things they’d discussed when it came to him

“Really? It’s that hard for you to say something complimentary?” he looks away, scoffs, but she can see the way his lashes glisten.

“I keep waiting for the right words, the perfect way to do this. Even though I know that perfect is a fantasy that should have died… with Lilly. I keep thinking I’ve outgrown it, but then I catch myself. Weevil… Eli. I suck at apologies and look I’m pretty much an asshole, or at least I have been, when it comes to you. So yeah, it is hard for me to say it, that yes you fuck up sometimes but no more frequently than I do for damned sure, that you are probably a better person than me… at least you are less selfish. ”

“Woah there,” he seems taken aback. “No need to cry over my grave just yet.”

It would be easy to smile and make a joke, insult him or go for the classic over the top innuendo, but she’s trying to change and he deserves to know.

“I’m sorry,” she tells him anyway. “You have always seen the real me and I’ve never wanted to see you for who you are. It’s a bad habit of mine… I’m working on it.”

“I’ve been working on my bad habits too, V,” he says reaching his hand out ever so slightly.

She takes it with her own, interlacing her fingers with his against the hospital sheet. They’ve never touched casually, her and him, too much high school static, and it means that electricity always takes her by surprise. It’s like he somehow feels more real, more solid than other people.

“I miss you,” she forces out, throat constricting as if trying to keep her from doing it. 

“I miss you too,” he offers back. “No idea why given everything, but I do.”

It’s not the time to explain everything she’s realized, not just about how wrong her treatment of him has been, but all the realizations about why maybe that might have been. He just got hit by a car and they haven’t talked in five years. So she should stop with this, a comforting hand, a graceless apology.

“Come on, you know you’ve been fantasizing about this ending up some sort of While You Were Sleeping amnesia scenario, where I don’t have the heart to tell you we aren’t a couple and then one things leads to another,” she teases. “That’s why you put me down on that form.”

“You know me, chica, such a hopeless romantic,” he starts to laugh but then winces.

You are, she thinks. Just like me you can’t give up imagining dramatic scenarios in your head, no matter how many times life kicks the shit out of you to teach you better.

“Romantic enough to be my friend again?” she asks.

“We were friends?” he quips back.

“Maybe we could be,” she says. “Or at least we could identify what we were or what we could be. Unless this is just meaningless nostalgia.”

“If you want to ask me out, Veronica, you should just say so,” he shakes his head and rolls his eyes.

“And what if I did?” she asks, internally preparing to laugh and take it back at the slightest sign. “Would that be a stupid idea, after everything?”

“Hard for me to say,” he tells her. “I mean I’ve always been a sucker for stupid ideas.”

It’s not a no, and it isn’t really a joke either. The ball is in her court.

“I mean, if we try it and it’s lame at least we will know. And hey, maybe that would really do the trick for us never speaking again.”

Maybe it really would. They’ve been through a lot, and that’s a reason to want him in her life, but one of the things Veronica has realized recently is just how in denial she had been about the undercurrent of that tension of possibility between them, even though she’d never really viewed it as an option… him as an option. Maybe without that they’d both leave well enough alone.

_You’ve never once left well alone with anything in your entire life, Veronica._

“Lame? You really think that’s a possibility? Crash and burn, sure. I can buy that we might be a hot mess. But I’m pretty sure neither of us have ever been lackluster, Veronica.”

Weev- Eli, she corrects herself again. To continue to think of him as Weevil is to refuse to see who he is now, to relegate him back to the box she put him in back at Neptune High. Eli bites his lip and smirks and Veronica knows that the smart play is to commit to friendship in lieu of the undefined something they have been all these years, but instead she leans over towards him.

She’d intended to be playful or sweet or something, but the moment their mouths meet it becomes something else, the buzz that accompanies all contact with him overshadowed, as if by a lightning strike. It’s a match to the gasoline soaked fodder of the last twenty years between them, as they both feverishly explore the long mapped by never trodden territory of one another’s mouths.

It is only the dim distant awareness of where they are that keeps her from crawling right into that bed with him, contusions and internal bleeding be damned.

“Well that’s one of my therapist’s theories supported,” she shudders as they finally separate for air.

“Oh?” he asks, though she can see he is resisting the urge to rise up from the hospital bed and pin her against the nearest surface.

“Are you sure the fighting between you isn’t a replacement for something else that starts with F,” she imitates the woman who has frustrated and helped her so much. “She’s going to be so smug.”

“Not as smug as I’m going to be,” Eli offers, “Unless, of course, that was just you testing a theory.”

“I don’t know,” she grins, resisting the urge to recapture his lips instead. “I think I’m going to need to do a lot more testing to be sure.”

“You buying me dinner first? Or is this a straight to dessert proposition?”

“Dinner afterwards?” she suggests, ignoring the moralizing voice that tells her she should do things the _right way_. That’s the voice that has discounted him this whole time, who liked every other narrative better, regardless of how poorly they actually fit the facts.

“You never did you anything by halves, Veronica Mars,” he tells her, and then they are kissing again and she thinks maybe that she could be herself with him, her whole self, if she lets herself. Because he’s not violent but he isn’t soft or yielding. He’s seen the bitch she can be, but he’s also seen her terrified and vulnerable. There she goes, romanticizing again, but at least this time she’s going to scratch that itch she’s been shoving to the back of her mind over and over again.

“I really was just going to apologize,” she murmurs.

“This is a hell of a lot more convincing,” he rumbles.

They should definitely stop. Soon. For sure. Any moment now.


End file.
